n3wjack's spurts of the mind and other geeky ramblings

your smartphone as a remote music controller

So you’re using your PC and the geekyist free media player around to pump your beats into the living room while you’re sitting in your cough reading your Twitter feed on your Android phone. Then this totally awesome tune gets streamed and you just want to turn up the volume a notch or two. Damn it! That means you’ll have to get out of that comfy seat of yours and walk a few metres through your living room and physically turn a knob (or press the keys to activate a hot-key to turn down the volume as you can easily do that with Foobar). Walk!? A few metres!? This is 2011 AD FFS! We have wireless networks and all sorts of marvellous technology invented to avoid having to physically move about and do stuff.

Thank the Cyber Gods there’s a Foobar plugin to fix just that! With this swell plugin called “HTTP Control” you can access your running Foobar2000 instance by surfing to it from your smartphone or fancy iPad. All you need is a link to you dedicated media-playing PC’s IP address and the assigned port in the plugin’s settings. Don’t forget to give that PC a fixed IP so the link stays the same. Otherwise you’ll end up having to get out of your couch anyway to figure out what bleedin’ IP your box got through DHCP after all.

If you’d rather go native with an Android app because that web thing takes too much effort to set up, you can with this Foobar2000 controller app. I’ve used it for a while now and it’s mighty dandy!